It wasn't pleased to see me

It was only last week -- we were driving back to camp through the western hills of Burma when I spotted a kid on the road carrying a big cat.

It didn't look exactly like a house cat, so I asked the driver to stop -- "Yeppa, yeppa" and jumped out with my camera.

The boy was clutching a jungle cat (Felis chaus), one of Asia's most widespread small cats (Egypt to SE Asia and SW China).

It wasn't pleased to see me and meowed constantly, but it didn't attempt to escape.

Normally I would have asked more questions, but I was part of a group, and the group had a busy agenda.

My guess is that the cat's mother was caught for the pot, and the boy raised the kitten.

Only a hand-reared jungle cat would be so tame.

In a patch of horsetail

 I have been stumbling into patches of horsetail for several years now.

You know the stuff . . . scour brush . . . puzzlegrass . . . Equisetum.

It's a bizarre and ancient family of plants, a living fossil.

I think I read somewhere that native Americans used the gritty stems as toothbrushes. If true, they had calloused gums and no tooth enamel.

Horsetail grows in moist soil, in small patches or large monocultures -- Jurassic gardens, so to speak, and an authentic venue for war games with dino toys.

I've wondered what if anything lurks in horsetail, until last September when I finally got around to setting a camera trap in a stand near the Mad River.

It was on a silted flood bench, measured about 60 by 30 feet, and was surrounded by riparian woodland -- sword fern, alder, willow, Ceanothus, and bay laurel.

It was a troublesome set.

The camera happened to be one of my early constructions with a rocker switch on the bottom, not a recommended design for a macro-set with the camera sitting on the ground.

Two months later (early November) I found that I had inadvertently switched off the power when I set the camera.

I set it again and waited another 75 days.

The battery pooped out after 53 days, but I was gruntled to find there were 260 exposures.







The usual suspects, woodrats and deer mice had evidently triggered many of the 110 blank exposures,

but we also got opossums, raccoons, bobcats, and a spotted skunk.








And a song sparrow.













Many of the larger mammals were captured as partial images, because this was a macro-set, and my real goal was -- you guessed it -- shrews and white-footed voles.

So I was pleased to get the shrew at the top of the page.

As for its identity, we can dismiss two possibilities.

The marsh shrew has a dark belly, nearly as dark as its back, and the fog shrew has a unicolored tail.

That leaves us with the Wandering shrew and the Trowbridge shrew, both of which have bicolored tails and winter coats of gray.

The site was suitable habitat for both species.

If we can find an even bigger patch of horsetail, I'm game for another set.

Return of a Champion

This anthology of writings by conservationist Frederick Walter Champion is a volume that dedicated camera trappers will want to read.

How do I know when I don't yet have a copy?

Well my friends, the codger has read both of Champion's books  -- With Camera in Tigerland (1927) and The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow (1934) more than once. They are worth re-reading. The anthology is based on chapters from these books and more.

Champion (1893-1970) was a British Indian forester, a dedicated naturalist, and a pioneering camera trapper.

His long out-of-print books are engaging records of how things were in the Indian jungle, not to mention reality checks for latter day camera trappers on their own personal trails of discovery.

Over the years Champion painstakingly acquired a splendid photographic portfolio of the subcontinent's mammals, large and small, and to this day his images remain among the most evocative records of India's striking fauna.

We have James Champion, grandson of the preeminent camera trapper to thank for compiling the anthology.

Here is more information about the book, and you may read selected pages of the work here.

To order it, go here (India) or here (UK).

I am sorry I can't give you a distributer in the US, but if anyone out there is able to locate one, please post it as a comment.

Interlude with a fat stick

Not all of my friends appreciate Fred's personality the way I do.

To some he's an unbearably spoiled extrovert.

I won't deny that he is spoiled, but most folks find at least a few of his antics amusing.

Take his 3-legged stance during morning constitutionals. It's become de rigeur. Has my regular praise at potty time reinforced this quirk?

Anyway, the other day we hiked down to the north fork of the Feather River and found that the sandy beach at Fred's swimming hole was replaced with a cobble bar.

Our extended family spent an afternoon on the sandy beach back in November.

My sister-in-law, a city girl, insisted "This isn't the right place."

"There was a sandy beach, remember?"

Cobbles driven into an alder crotch
5 feet above the bank. 

I explained that the floods must have washed it away, but she didn't buy it.

Finally I pointed to the more permanent features of the site and convinced her that high water can wash away a beach or fill a deep swimming hole with sand.

In addition to driving several cobbles between the limbs of an alder tree the floods also deposited a new crop of flotsam.





Fred quickly found a suitable stick and morphed into his stick-obsessed Labrador persona.

Then I found a fat punky chunk of wood and lobbed it into the river, and the dog gave full-throated chase.

The transformative effect of the super-normal stimulus was magical.

He emerged stick-smitten and pranced with the trophy.

He dropped it and barked . . . my cue to toss it in again.

The fat stick stirred Fred's dog emotions deeply.

He whined and yodeled as he tried to turn it with his paws.

He gnawed off great chunks of punky wood, and every time he lost his paw grip he would emote like a deranged hound of the Baskervilles.  

When it was to time to march back to the car, Fred wouldn't part ways with his beloved fat stick.

He gripped it in his jaws even when he rested.  He knew his beloved would roll back to the river if he set it down. 

After a mile and a half his ardor waned, and he abandoned fat stick on the trail. 

We were only two hundred yards from the car.

It had been a wildly passionate interlude, but he was exhausted.  

He crashed as soon as we got home.

Among the fungus eaters

Finding the Fog shrew (previous post) had a seductive effect. I decided to set three cameras in the damp fern-choked slash on that same north slope.

I was still after mountain beaver, but I wanted to see what else was scooting around in there.

I was looking for the charismatic little guys.

"Botherations" visit the camera trapper in a thicket.

You need a scaled-down perspective, and to get a Lilliputian's view you have to crawl around in the undergrowth.

It was a different world in there, but various camera trap sets soon presented themselves, and I decided to skip the use of bait or lure.

The holidays came and went, and last week during a spell of clear weather Terry and I made a dash for the cameras.

All but one contained water and several were too wet to work. (A few days over the wood burning stove fixed all but one.)

I was pleased to get mountain beaver, shadow chipmunk, and another shrew, as well as the usual deer mice and a winter wren.





But the prize was this vole.  It wasn't the usual meadow vole, that I knew.





But could it be the mysterious white-footed vole (Arborimus albipes), the arboreal browser of alder leaves? Or was it the California red-backed vole (Myodes californicus)?

It never hurts to have friends who are taxonomists, so I sent the photos to Al Gardner at the National Museum of Natural History.

He identified it as the California red-backed vole, Myodes californicus.

Myodes californicus? What happened to Clethrionomys californicus? That's the name in my mammal books. Am I living in the taxonomic past?

Al wrote:

". . . some Russians are trying to resurrect Clethrionomys, but I don't think they will be successful. The few Arborimus albipes I looked at all have longer tails and lacked the "reddish" back. I did  not see any Arborimus albipes in the general collection from Arcata, which is the type locality. It would be nice to get specimens (with tissue). If you get up to Arcata tale a look at the mammal collection. Incidentally, some M. californicus do have white feet."

This is not a species you attract with bait.

California red-bacled voles are subterranean fungus eaters, truffle specialists, and according to Chris Maser's excellent book, they are usually found in conifer forests with little ground cover but abundant rotting logs.

This is where I found the vole.

There are redwood groves near by, but it is not coniferous forest. It's early second growth -- braken and sword fern, salal, Ceanothus and alder. And a colony of mountain beaver.

So I wonder?

Is the California red-backed vole another free loader seeking truffles in the mountain beaver's underworld?


Reference

Maser, Chris. 1998. Mammals of the Pacific Northwest. Oregon State University Press.

The fog shrew's identity crisis

By

Set 587 was in a thicket of ceanothus and sword fern, on a steep logged hillside, riddled with mountain beaver burrows.

I think you know what I was expecting.

No mountain beaver waddled into the camera's view, but a bear left one picture,





















The picture of its paw didn't tickle my curiosity to surf the web for information on ursid foot anatomy.

There were many photos of a fox sparrow scratching for insects and seeds. No surprises there.

The critter at the top of the page was too small to see on the camera's LCD, but when I uploaded the photos at Terry's house I saw something unusual -- a large cinnamon-colored shrew.

I pulled a copy of Jameson and Peeter's California Mammals  (the first edition) from my friend's bookcase, and gleefully discovered that I had camera-trapped my 6th species of shrew -- Sorex pacificus -- Cowabunga!

I celebrated with my friends that night -- two beers and a Mexican dinner.

At home a couple days later I looked up the shrew in my own copy of Jameson and Peeters, the 2004 edition.

Sorex pacificus was gone.

A taxonomist had put to rest northern California's  cinnamon-colored shrew known as Sorex pacificus and reincarnated it as Sorex sonomae, the fog shrew.

This had taken place sometime between the two editions of the field guide.

My list of camera trapped shrews was back to 5 species.

Sorex sonomae has been caught up in an ongoing cycle of taxonomic death and reincarnation.

I bored you with the fog shrew's taxonomic story once before, but this event stirred me to revisit the story of the fog shrew's identity crisis.

This slow-moving drama actually began in 1858 at Fort Umpqua, Oregon, a trading post of the Hudson Bay Company, where a U.S. Medical Inspector named E.P. Vollum acquired a large reddish shrew.

Recognizing its scientific value, he sent it to the Smithsonian Institution where it was safely stored with other stuffed shrews and their skulls.

Some 30 years later (1877) it caught the interest of the bearded surgeon-naturalist Elliott Coues who described it as a new species, Sorex pacificus.

In 1895 the naturalist-Oregonian, B.J.Bretherton collected another large reddish-colored shrew from Yaquina Bay, less than 50 miles from the type locality of Sorex pacificus. 

The man who was to describe it as a new species, Hartley H.T. Jackson was 4-years old at the time. 

That year C. Hart Merriam,  Chief of the USDA's Division of Ornithology and Mammalogy, was wrapping up his synopsis of long-tailed shrews. 

It was based on 1200 specimens from all over the country, and he boiled them down to 41 species and subspecies.  

Ironically, Merriam, the great taxonomic splitter who described 86 forms of North American Grizzly bears 23 years later, took a hard line on taxonomic splitting. 

In this work he declared that "the multiplication of closely related forms has been avoided". 

"Sorex pacificus", he wrote, "stands alone and does not require comparison with any other species, its great size and peculiar cinnamon-rufous color serving to distinguish it at sight."  

He classified all the big cinnamon-colored shrews of the west coast as pacificus, including Bretherton's Yaquina shrew and the other 12 specimens collected as far away as Point Reyes, California. 

And so it was for the next two decades.  Then the 27-year-old Jackson decided that Bretherton's specimen deserved recognition as a distinct species.

He named it Sorex yaquinae, and embarked on a 10-year meditation on the relationships of the long-tailed shrews.

In his A taxonomic review of the American Long-tailed Shrews in 1928 he concluded that the Yaquina shrew was only a subspecies of Sorex pacificus.

He also described another large species of shrew that had been collected from the bank of the Gualala River in Sonoma County, California, which he named Sorex sonomae. 

Sorex pacificus yaquinae and Sorex sonomae remained apart taxonomically for 30 years, but a great deal of "new material" (additional specimens) had accumulated in the meantime.

There were 3,465 specimens to examine when a University of Kansas Ph. D. student named James Findley decided to make sense of the highly variable wandering shrew (Sorex vagrans) .

He noted that the long-tailed shrews are morphologically uniform, that cranial proportions vary allometrically with body size, and concluded that body size and color are the only differences of taxonomic significance.

He then went on to revamp a large number of named forms as wandering shrews, Sorex vagrans, including yaquinae, pacificus and sonomae. The three big west coast shrews colored like dead conifer needles became subspecies of Sorex vagrans. 

Findley's intriguing hypothesis was that wandering shrews were the personae dramatis in a Pleistocene epic of changing climate, landform, and habitat.

He viewed the Fog shrew (sonomae) and its look-alike relatives pacificus and yaquinae as oversized wandering shrews living in isolation on the frontier of the species geographic range.

Their differentiation from the parent stock had exceeded the possibilities of hybridization.

For 25 years the Fog shrew remained just an oversized wandering shrew, but the next players in the saga noted that, "Findley's revision was greeted cautiously by some".

The Pacific shrew and the Wandering shrew were alive and well in the pages of Lloyd Ingles' Mammals of the Pacific States published in 1965.

The new players in the saga, Darwen Hennings and Bob Hoffmann (1977) officially exhumed pacificus as a legitimate species, and recognized sonomae and yaquinae as subspecies. 

Thirteen years later (1990), Leslie Carraway examined the specimens once again and elevated Sorex pacificus sonomae to a full species -- Sorex sonomae, and classified Humbolt County's cinnamon colored shrews (formerly pacificus) as the same.  Sorex yaquinae also got a makeover and became Sorex pacificus pacificus.

To sum it up, our big cinnamon-colored fog shrew of Humbolt County started out as Sorex pacificus, was reincarnated as Sorex vagrans pacificus, was once again reincarnated as its former self, Sorex pacificus pacificus, and was finally reincarnated as Sorex sonomae tenelliodus.   

Not that you cared.

But the take home message for the naturalist blogger is this: use current field guides if you want to get the scientific names right.


(Thanks to Neil Woodman for guiding me to critical references, and to Kristen Bullard of Smithsonian Libraries for getting me PDFs of most of them.)

A bit of camera trapping history

If there are any camera trappers out there who would like a bit of camera trapping history to hang in their den or cam-hacking workshop, this is your chance.

The buck white-tail shot by George Shiras, 3rd is for sale.

This is the 275 lb. buck shot by Shiras one-mile west of Whitefish Lake Camp, which can be seen on page 206 of his Hunting Wildlife with Camera and Flashlight (volume 1).

The mount will be auctioned by Scott Heikkila, who lives in the UP knows Shiras's old camera trapping haunts.

Says Scott, "I have been to lots of the places that George has and really like his books and photos.  I have had the head for a long time and would like to see it somewhere that it can be appreciated by more people."  
 
If you interested email Scott at Heikks@hotmail.com.